About our expert panel

Our expert panel offers a wide array of profiles and experiences. Customer centricity in financial services can be discussed from many different angles. It is not only about sales or marketing. Customer experience and empathy management need to go hand-in-hand with the knowledge of latest technological advances and trends, from data management to artificial intelligence use. But let’s not forget about people again. Different clients have different needs and wishes, but they have one thing in common: they want all interactions involving their money to be safe. Only then can banks continue to enjoy the trust of their clients. Our panellists reflect the diversity of the conference topic.

Phil Bonhard leads the UX/CX team at Lloyds Banking Group, but he is also an independent CX consultant, lecturer and mentor. Phil knows how to empathise with customers, but he is also passionate about the innovations Fintechs bring to the banking sector, which brings us to the techie part of our topic. Artificial Intelligence expert Cedric Maloux is a tech and crypto believer. He helps startups in the Prague StartupYard get through the childhood and thrive. Cedric also successfully raised some cybersec babies and one Fintech youngster from the StartupYard, BudgetBakers, is currently co-owned and managed by our next panellist Michal Kratochvíl. Michal is an experienced top manager who left the world of banking consultancy corporations and jumped into the wild waters of Fintech startups. He knows both worlds and can talk about how banks should evolve to serve best their clients.

But there is more to it than that. We also have bank insiders. Pavel Kysilka is an experienced former large bank CEO and he knows the world of banking more than enough. When it comes to the current transformation of large banks into flexible, customer-centric financial service providers, Pavel has the hands-on experience to share with the audience. Also, since his departure from Česká spořitelna, Pavel has been engaged in forward-looking educational and consultancy activities for the digital age, being acquainted with the latest trends in finance and business in general, putting them in a larger framework of societal development. Because digital transformation is not the goal, it is only a means that can be used for the better or for the worse. The ultimate goal should be the well-being of the society as a whole, with a little help from the banking sector.

Talking about society, we should not forget the people. They are not all millennials, tech geeks and hyper-mobile entrepreneurs. Following a research recently carried out for the Czech Banking Association, one third of bank clients are conservative and do not like frequent innovations; also, the appetite for flesh-and-bone people being replaced by robots or other form of artificial intelligence in banks is still low. These questions will be touched upon by Vincent Piron, partner at KPMG Belgium, who is an experienced leader in CX and business transformation of large banks. Vincent will also talk about workforce wellbeing and development in this context. Last but not least, as mentioned above, we need to face the delicate question of security, which is the cornerstone of trust. Nikolaos Chrysaidos, Head of Mobile Threat Intelligence and Security from Avast will explain the latest threats in customer-centric omnichannel distribution. Nikolaos will also talk about social engineering and machine learning.

To wrap it up, with our six speakers, we will have covered the three main pillars of the topic: technological and management trends, customer insights and people first, and finally security and trust as the backbone of the whole system.